However, he said they've not done as good a job in inpatient settings, where some studies indicate nearly half of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary or inappropriate, according to CDC figures.

"We're giving antibiotics to people who don't need them, or for even those who do need them, we're giving the wrong one or giving the wrong dose," he said. "That's an area we haven't seen as much progress as we'd like."

The organization has, nonetheless, started a hospital-targeted program, called Get Smart for Healthcare.

Progress is also somewhat lacking when it comes to influencing the public. According to a 2010 European Commission report, nearly half of Europeans believe antibiotics kill viruses, and are effective against the cold and flu.

And in the developing world, there are unhappy trends: antibiotics can often be bought over the counter without a prescription. For instance, according to a recent World Health Organization study, 42 percent of Mongolian children get unprescribed antibiotics for respiratory tract infections.

"It's very easy for me to walk into a pharmacy in India, and say, 'Give me ciprofloxacin,'" said Narayan Krishnaswami, bioMérieux's global product manager for nosocomial infections. "You can easily get it without a prescription."

Proper incentives

But in addition to better use of antibiotics, we need new ones. And the challenge here is partly economic: convincing drug companies to invest in developing antibiotics.

A forum panelist, Aidan Hollis, professor of economics with University of Calgary in Canada, said one solution could be to change the incentive structure for pharmaceutical companies.

"We need a mechanism that's going to support firms developing drugs, but at the same time won't encourage them to just sell as much of the product as possible," he said in a video interview recorded by the forum organizers.

Generally, it's hard to convince pharmaceutical companies to invest in researching drugs that can take decades to reach a market already swamped with cheap generics. And once their drug does reach the market, if it's a new, last-resort antibiotic, then by its very nature, it's seldom prescribed.

But Hollis said one approach could use a mixture of long-period exclusivity rights to the drug maker, with payments based not just on selling the drug, but using it appropriately.

Those payments would come from a global public fund created by the world's richer countries. One condition of receiving payments from the fund would be that companies would have to sell their products at low prices.

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